Child Of The North

Congal · Child Of The North

Source ... Child Of The North by Piers Dudgeon with Josephine Cox.

Josephine Cox a writer of best selling books based mostly on her days growing up in Blackburn Lancashire.

Josephine Cox....child of the north.

Josephine Cox was born in Blackburn during its decline as the cotton weaving capital of the world. Life was hard but characterful, the joys and tragedies of her youth later inspiring her multi-million selling novels.

One of ten children,Jo knew poverty,hunger and the charity of the Ragged School. Between births her mother worked in the cotton mills,her father on the roads. Sleeping up to six in a bed - 'three top,three bottom' - her family lived among the tightly packed,working-class terraces of Blackburn. But Jo never felt victimised or shamed.

'I was born in Derwent Street in Blackburn,Lancashire,during the Second World War,and my earliest memories are sitting on the front doorstep,watching the world created in that street.

Deprived and confined thought my world was,it was never quiet or uneventful,and for all its inherent difficulties. I would not want to change it. I could never deny my upbringing,because it is who I am; my roots are firmly embedded in those difficult,frustrating,wonderful days,when food was short and 'nice clothes' were what someone else wore.

The square-headed,black-coated lamps quietly guarded the pavements by day and lit the way home for lovers and drunks of a night-time. The back-to-back houses with their tiny yards and cold,outside damp lavvies were situated in a discrete corner beside the midden hole.

There were other memorable 'landmarks' in my young life......The Ragged School,where Christian people offered practical help and comfort to the children from poorer backgrounds than their own.

The burgeoning worker colonies comprised endless,closed-in rows of terraced housing,two rooms upstairs,two rooms down,no bathroom,no hot water except that which was boiled in a kettle,no front garden,a backyard scarely big enough to turn around in and an outside lavatory backing onto a narrow passage.

The world that met Josephine Cox's curious stare from the doorstep of her house in the workin-class Blackburn community of the 1940s and early '50s was still,as she noted in her first novel[Her Father's Sins,] the old Lancashire,steeped in a tradition of cotton and ale - A Lancashire unwelcoming and unresponsive to the gentle nudging wind of change.....change would come,of that there could be no doubt. The old narrow houses with their steep unhygenic backyards,pot-sinks and outside lavvies,they wouldn't escape.....But for now, Blackburn remained relatively intact and contented and fiercely defended by every man,woman and child,who had never experienced any other way. They delighted in the open-topped rattling trams,the muffin-mans familar shout,as he pushed his deep wicker basket along the uneven cobbles,and the screech of the cotton-mill,starting another day. AS LONG AS ONE AND ALL WERE LEFT ALONE TO MAKE THEIR OWN WAY,THEY BOTHERED NOBODY AND ASKED NO FAVOURS The children spilled out to all the streets,played with their skipping-ropes,hula-hoops and spinning tops,their laughter no less spontaneous because of inherent poverty..

Congal

Just wondering how all this came about.

Forty's and fiftie's Blackburn meant smoke and dirt,and smut and grime coming out of the coal fires in the homes,fumes and chemicals from the industries. Jo herself talks of the 'closed-in feeling' of the maze of streets where she played and of 'the houses dark and grim'.

'When I was thinking about that particular book,several titles came to me. I was looking for the feeling of how it was for us at home,' she replied. 'Now my younger brother,when he was born, I was about five,and I remember vividly my mother bringing him home from hospital and his cradle was an orange box lined with newspaper in front of the fire. That came to me when I was thinking of that book. All of us,all of us children never had a warm cradle......you are not supposed to suffer when you are a child,you are supposed to be cossetted warm and safe. But at home there was never food in the cupboards. We lived each day as it came and life was very difficult.

'Iam talking about the kind of poverty that you really can't get to grips with unless you have been through it. During my childhood,we never had any cups in our house,only jam-jars or milk bottles to drink out of'.

'The house had a cellar,quite a deep cellar which was full of water because the river flooded,and whoever had been in the house before us had chopped half the steps away. You couldn't see that it had half the steps chopped away because the water was so high,but after four steps,there were no more,just a huge drop!'

'Almost all of the houses that we lived in had cellars,and they were often flooded,though not Derwent Street. King Street had a cellar,the next house in Whalley Bank had a cellar,and then the next. Henry Street had a huge cellar. We kept the coal there of course,and if Blakewater broke its banks and flooded it,then one of my brothers would have to go swimming for the coal down there,bringing up pieces of coal while another brother would wait on the steps with a bucket until it was full!'
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Congal

The accelerated growth of Glasgow's industry since the late 18th Century had created a crisis of housing and town planning problems by the mid-20th century. Housing conditions and overcrowding proved to be particularly intractable. As Glasgow attracted ever more workers to service her expanding industries, cheap new housing had to be squeezed into the city to accommodate them. The result was an agglomeration of single-room cheap tenements (three, four or five storeys high), with 'closes' (streets) so narrow that neighbours could shake hands across them. Light was blocked out, rubbish and pollution accumulated and the scheme soon descended into a foetid, disease-ridden mass of squalor and degradation. The city was notoriously cited as having the worst housing conditions in the British Isles.

No Mean City by Thomas Kennedy.

I stood at the Cross and looked around me. The Town of Glasgow has a small city centre really, surrounded by black and grey, grimy tenement slums. No matter how you approached Glasgow, whether coming from North, South, East or West, to get to the city centre you passed area after area of slum tenements.Argyle street led to the Anderston slums where I was born Down the Saltmarket just fifteen minutes walk were the Gorbals slums. Five minutes up the High street were the Townhead slums.Along London road to the Bridgeton slums and Gallowgate to the Dennistoun slums.
A vision of my Granny, my Mother's Mother, came to me when I thought of Dennistoun. She lived inone room in a tenement there. I had only seen my Granny twice, once where she lived and once at my Uncle Isaac's house, yet I had a very clear memory of her. I was about twelve when my Mother took me to see her. She seemed very small to me and her face was very wrinkled. She had shown me a very old photograph, it was very brownish. It was a photograph of a soldier with a very large moustache.
'That's your Grandfather.' She said. 'He went off to war in South Africa and never came back. They were shouting in the streets 'Mafeking's been relieved,' but he never came back and I was left with five wanes(children)'. I remembered her adding, with a lift of her head, 'He was a soldier of the Queen', and I who had been indoctrinated by patriotism by the age of twelve shared her pride.
The slum tenements were privately owned properties. The owners had offices in the town centre, known as the 'Factors offices' where you went to pay your rent. I felt myself feeling depressed and decided to make my way to Springburn where I would meet my mother.
I got on a tram in the High street that was behind Glasgow Cross. I knew this area well having lived all round it as a child. A little way up the High street, on the left, was George street. We had lived there in 'rooms' as it was called. Rooms were one room rented in a tenement dwelling from someone who was fortunate enough to have a three room dwelling.Six of us lived in that one room.Father, Mother, Andy, Duncan, wee Mary and myself. My eldest brother Ian was in the Air force. We were not there very long and moved to a house in Rotten Row just above George street. A 'house' was what the Glaswegians called their slum dwelling, not a flat or an apartment.Perhaps 'Hoose' was the proper word. 'We've got a guid wee hoose' was a common expression of a Glaswegian, meaning they lived in two rooms in a slum tenement. On a subsequent visit to Rotten Row I wondered why this mean street was so named. Did 'Rotten' have some other meaning that I wasn't aware of? I looked the word up in the dictionary. The root meaning was decay.
So Rotten Row was aptly named. The tenement building was infested by rats. We had two rooms. The main room was always referred to as the kitchen. As in all the tenement buildings the kitchen had a 'Hole in the wall bed', as we called it. This was an alcove in which a bed was placed. That was where my parents slept. There was a fire range. This was a cast iron range with a box fire place and an oven on the side of it. This too was standard in the tenement buildings, it provided the heating and cooking tool. A large cast iron kettle always stood on the hob keeping the water warm. You slid it over on to the fire to boil water. Every effort was made, especially in the winter, to keep the fire alight over night. This was done by saving old tea-leafs and potato peelings, you mixed this with dross(coal dust) and cinders and placed it on the fire before going to bed. We had no such thing as garbage, everything that could burn would go on the fire, even a pair of old boots with no wear left in them would go on the fire.Sauce bottles and jam jars could be returned to the shops for pennies. Tin cans, though we didn't see many of them, could be used as containers. The middens, as we called the units for disposing of rubbish, were at the back of the tenement buildings. All they ever contained was ashes. Cinders from the burnt out coal were constantly re-cycled.
I could remember days when we had no fire, because we had no coal. It always seemed to be the winter months when we had no coal. They were terrible days. Next to food coal was the most important element to have, without it you had nothing to cook with and no heat and the room became freezing cold and damp.
It was thousands of these tenement fires belching their smoke from the chimneys that created the greyness that hung over Glasgow. Added to this would be the hundreds of industrial factory chimneysThe back room, the second room was always refereed to as the back room, was where Andy, Duncan, and I slept. The toilet, or lavatory as we called it, was on a landing between the dwellings.Several families shared this lavatory.Wee Mary slept in a pram in the kitchen. At night, because of the rats, the pram was lifted on to a scrubbed table. The legs of the table were placed into pots or basins of water for fear of the rats. We didn't live there very long but before we moved my Mother had another baby. Wee Sammy, so wee Mary was then just Mary but she would soon regain her title when wee Sammy died.
The tram came to Townhead. On the right was John Knox street, that was where we moved to from Rotten Row and where wee Sammy died. There was a cemetery opposite the tenement building where we lived and wee Sammy was buried there.

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Uncharted Waters by Henry Sinnerton....

Spence's background,like that of Ervine and Hutchinson,is of the very stuff of working-class unionism. He was born and reared 'in deprivation and squalor',as he himself says,at 66 Joseph Street,now gone,at the bottom of the Shankill Road in West Belfast,in a row of two-up,two-down houses, 'We had a scullery,' he says, 'and if you had swung a half-decent cat you would have bashed its brains out against the walls. And the outside toilet,of course. In the winter nights,if there was one available and only if there was one available,you took a candle out with you to the toilet.' There were nine of the Spences living in that house,he had four brothers and two sisters.

We slept in this onion box of a house. My father and my elder brother slept in the 'box room' and we slept in the big room. It took two double beds squeezed in,and four of the younger brothers slept two-up two-down,or top 'n' tail as they say to-day.and my mother and the two sisters slept in the other bed. The four feet of the beds sat in Cherry Blossom[boot polish] tins,into which had been poured some lamp oil or paraffin oil,in order to stop bugs and cockroaches getting up to the children.

franko

I can see why they were Unionists.

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Babygael

It reminds me of catherine cookson novels which focus 's on the extreme poverty of her own upbringing in Tyneside,newcastle. I have always loved a novel with lots of factual social commentry.I am always amazed at bare foot children playing in the streets in that climate!

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Rinty · i

I'm struggling to get this thread. Are they just random excerpts from books about working class poverty or is there a reason to place Gusty Spence, Billy Hutchison and David Ervine in the equation?

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Child Of The North

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